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Myth: The #Fediverse™ Is Decentralised™
I run my own #Mastodon instance just for myself. An instance of one. What does that mean on today’s fediverse?
It means I’m on mastodon.social.
What?
That makes no sense!
Let me explain:
Since I have my own instance, surely I decide who I follow and anyone can follow me, right?
Wrong.
For ~1M accounts, Eugen decides. If he blocks my instance, a large number of people who follow me today will no longer be able to.
So I may as well be on his server.
The same goes for other large servers.
Look at how many of the people you interact with are on the handful of the largest servers and imagine that just those handful of servers blocked your server.
Come, let‘s take this further…
Apparently Facebook/Meta is “joining” the fediverse. How nice of them. Now imagine that the largest instance is run by Zuckerberg. (Or <insert your favourite Silicon Valley billionaire here>.)
Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social…
I'm no expert but I think I see what you're getting at.
Malevolent intentions will wreak havoc.
@aral this is what basically happened with XMPP. All big players joined, only to build walled gardens later and excluding anyone that had their smaller servers.
@jsoriano @aral “But I hang around in a few nice 60-users chatrooms! #WorksOnMyMachine”
@fishidwardrobe @aral for me the point is to don't trust them, they are doing this only for their business, not for the people.
@jsoriano @aral Don't trust who? Facebook? Sure? One of the hundred or so independent XMPP servers still running? Not so much. https://list.jabber.at/
@fishidwardrobe @aral yes Meta, or any other big player that expresses support for an open protocol.
arc) 
As a recent arrival, it's counterintuitive to me as to why I would move to a smaller server.
I'm sure that's my own ignorance, but if you could explain conceptually why we should spread out, that would probably help with the people like me coming over from Reddit to grasp these new ways of doing.
A video or guidelines or recommendations.
What I found before I came was more descriptive than prescriptive.
Also, moving to smaller instances can help those larger instances as well. For example, the users there can experience less issues with the service, the moderation will be easier and the cost to run the instance will be lower.
Also, you might want to try another software that provides features that Mastodon doesn't. There are lots of instances out there to try out. For new users, I suggest visiting fediverse.party to see what the fediverse can provide.
@aral
Thanks, that helps.
@getimiskon @aral I was just reading about Meta and this is what happend to me. I left Reddit during the blackout. still happening and i came to mastodon, lemmy and kbin because everyone is doing it. I really don't know what to do now. Meta will destroy the #fediverse period!
️ They don’t even support linking in posts on Facebook. How is the same company supposed to be part of a distributed network?
Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social
Now you all know how small instances suffered when they were being blocked because their opinion differed than that of the admins of large instances and Y’all kept silent. Or when people used Fedi software created by someone they didn’t like, you were fedi blocked.
Reminds me of that, “First they came…”
@aral If you develop in the public you give away control. It's by design.
1. You block anything related to Meta. You exclude everyone that use Meta.
2. You do not block anything related to Meta. You welcome everyone that use Meta.
Meta will probably embrace, extend and extinguish whether you choose 1. or 2. that doesn't matter, but with choice 2. you at least will have some people who will be signing up with an instance not Meta.
Regardless of choice, you'll end up with 2 separate networks.
@aral
Is everything on the fediverse open source?
@aral But the problem here are the users who join one server instead of spreading out, big servers can't really do much for that (Eugen can because of the app but that's something else).
The task is not to demonize Meta for the fact that they come to the Fediverse, but the task is to ensure that those who come additionally to the Fediverse, also distribute themselves and not all go to Meta, because there is star A or Influencer B. And then at some point you no longer have the problem that 10% of the users fall away because an instance falls away (block or delete).
@aral hmm, most of the people that i still interact with are on smaller, niche servers, or self hosted ones
Perhaps this instance here is already muted or blocked to reach the big servers, i dont know
@aral The problem is ... how big is "too big"? How should the governance structure for servers with > 1 users look? I don't assume you're suggesting that everyone runs their own "server of one".
@decathorpe Not on the fediverse, no. It just wouldn’t be feasible with the current design. But on the Small Web, yeah. That’s what it’s being designed for :)
@aral what only time will tell us is whether the people will do anything about it?
Nice thing about mastodon is that if you're not happy on one server, it's not much work to move. The popular vote will win here bc if any one instance owner does something the majority disagrees with, they will migrate elsewhere.
Of course, they might not. But that's democracy.
Do I like it? No, because it is a risk that the majority is objectively wrong or immoral. Do we have a choice? Probably not?